Data Science Masters

The Capstone Project Experience

In the final two quarters of the program, students gain real world experience working in small groups on a data science challenge facing a company or not-for-profit. At the conclusion of the capstone project, sponsoring organizations are invited to attend a formal Capstone Event where students showcase their work. Capstone projects typically span a wide range of interests, including energy, agriculture, retail, urban planning, healthcare, marketing, and education.

Examples of Previous Capstone Sponsors

  • Adobe
  • Amazon
  • Amplero
  • Applied Physics Lab, UW
  • Boeing
  • Civil & Environmental Engineering, WSU
  • Clobotics
  • Equal Opportunity Schools
  • The Hershey Company
  • Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens
  • JLL
  • Kids on 45th
  • Meta
  • Microsoft
  • Milliman
  • NetApp
  • Seattle Children’s Hospital
  • Tiller
  • Urban Planning, UW
  • Virginia Mason
  • Zillow

Capstone Archives

Capstone projects take a variety of forms.  These include, but are not limited to, dashboard development, data analysis, pipeline building, and machine learning models.  The scope and goal of each project is developed to satisfy sponsor needs and student interests.

2024 Cohort

In 2024 sixteen teams presented capstone posters at our MSDS co-working space.  These projects included audio signal analysis (Bats!, SonarSquad, Hydrophonatics), pipeline development (Ocastra, Virufy), dashboards (DataNuggets, EqualOpportunitySchools, Koalified), image analysis (Diateam, TreeMusketeers, PixelPioneers), large language model tools (EquityEngine, MetaMinds, SCubed, Trojans), and data collection and analysis (Virgina Mason).  Many of these projects combined data collection, analysis, modeling, and dashboard development.

Please find PDF versions of all posters here.  (These files are enclosed in a zip folder for your convenience.)

Gather Interactive Archives

Due to the pandemic, our Capstone 2021 was held entirely online in the Gather.Town platform, to which we added galleries of our 2020 and 2022 Capstone projects for an archive you can digitally wander and browse.

Gather presents a map-based, interactive platform where you can wander among projects, see media like posters, infographics, and video, and do video/audio chat with others who are logged into the space. You can read some basics about using this platform at the Gather site. One of the other benefits of Gather is that it created a persistent archive of our Capstone 2020-2022 projects, which you can view and digitally wander among here:

https://tinyurl.com/msdsfair